What "People's History" Is All About

by Howard Zinn

Mr. Zinn is the author with Anthony Arnove of the just published Voices of a People's History of the United States (Seven Stories Press) and of the international best-selling A People's History of the United States.

When I decided, in the late 1970s, to write A People's History of the United States,
I had been teaching history for twenty years. Half of that time I was involved
in the civil rights movement in the South, when I was teaching at Spelman College,
a black women's college in Atlanta, Georgia. And then there were ten years of
activity against the war in Vietnam. Those experiences were not a recipe for neutrality
in the teaching and writing of history.

But my partisanship was undoubtedly shaped even earlier by my upbringing in
a family of working-class immigrants in New York, by my three years as a shipyard
worker, starting at the age of eighteen, and then by my experience as an Air
Force bombardier in World War II, flying out of England and bombing targets
in various parts of Europe, including the Atlantic coast of France.

After the war I went to college under the GI Bill of Rights. That was a piece
of wartime legislation that enabled millions of veterans to go to college without
paying any tuition, and so allowed the sons of working-class families who ordinarily
would never be able to afford it to get a college education. I received my doctorate
in history at Columbia University, but my own experience made me aware that
the history I learned in the university omitted crucial elements in the history
of the country.

From the start of my teaching and writing, I had no illusions about "objectivity,"
if that meant avoiding a point of view. I knew that a historian (or a journalist,
or anyone telling a story) was forced to choose, from an infinite number of
facts, what to present, what to omit. And that decision inevitably would reflect,
whether consciously or not, the interests of the historian.

There is an insistence, among certain educators and politicians in the United
States, that students must learn facts. I am reminded of the character in Charles
Dickens's book Hard Times, Gradgrind, who admonishes a younger teacher: "Now,
what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone
are wanted in life."

But there is no such thing as a pure fact, innocent of interpretation. Behind
every fact presented to the world -- by a teacher, a writer, anyone -- is a
judgment. The judgment that has been made is that this fact is important, and
that other facts are not important and so they are omitted from the presentation.

There were themes of profound importance to me that I found missing in the
orthodox histories that dominated American culture. The consequence of these
omissions has been not simply to give a distorted view of the past but, more
importantly, to mislead us all about the present.

For instance, there is the issue of class. The dominant culture in the United
States -- in education, among politicians, in the media -- pretends that we
live in a classless society with one common interest. The Preamble to the United
States Constitution, which declares that "we the people" wrote this
document, is a great deception. The Constitution was written in 1787 by fifty-five
rich white men -- slave owners, bondholders, merchants -- who established a
strong central government that would serve their class interests.

That use of government for class purposes, to serve the needs of the wealthy
and powerful, has continued throughout American history, down to the present
day. It is disguised by language that suggests all of us, rich and poor and
middle class, have a common interest.

Thus, the state of the nation is described in universal terms. When the president
declares happily that "our economy is sound," he will not acknowledge
that it is not sound for forty or fifty million people who are struggling to
survive, although it may be moderately sound for many in the middle class, and
extremely sound for the richest 1% of the nation who own 40% of the nation's
wealth.

Class interest has always been obscured behind an all-encompassing veil called
"the national interest."

My own war experience, and the history of all those military interventions
in which the United States was engaged, made me skeptical when I heard people
in high political office invoke "the national interest" or "national
security" to justify their policies. It was with such justifications that
Harry Truman initiated a "police action" in Korea that killed several
million people, that Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon carried out a war in Southeast
Asia in which perhaps three million people died, that Ronald Reagan invaded
Grenada, that the elder Bush attacked Panama and then Iraq, and that Bill Clinton
bombed Iraq again and again.

The claim made in spring of 2003 by the new Bush that invading and bombing
Iraq was in the national interest was particularly absurd, and could only be
accepted by people in the United States because of a blanket of lies spread
across the country by the government and the major organs of public information
-- lies about "weapons of mass destruction," lies about Iraq's connections
with Al Qaeda.

When I decided to write A People's History of the United States, I decided
I wanted to tell the story of the nation's wars not through the eyes of the
generals and the political leaders but from the viewpoints of the working-class
youngsters who became GIs, or the parents or wives who received the black-bordered
telegrams.

I wanted to tell the story of the nation's wars from the viewpoint of the enemy:
the viewpoint of the Mexicans who were invaded in the Mexican War, the Cubans
whose country was taken over by the United States in 1898, the Filipinos who
suffered a devastating aggressive war at the beginning of the twentieth century,
with perhaps 600,000 people dead as a result of the determination of the U.S.
government to conquer the Philippines.

What struck me as I began to study history, and what I wanted to convey in
my own writing of history, was how nationalist fervor -- inculcated from childhood
by pledges of allegiance, national anthems, waving flags, and militaristic rhetoric
-- permeated the educational systems of all countries, including our own.

I wondered how the foreign policies of the United States would look if we wiped
out the national boundaries of the world, at least in our minds, and thought
of children everywhere as our own. Then we could never drop an atomic bomb on
Hiroshima, or napalm on Vietnam, or cluster bombs on Afghanistan or Iraq, because
wars, especially in our time, are always wars against children.

The Spoken Word as a Political Act

When I began to write "people's history," I was influenced by my
own experience, living in a black community in the South with my family, teaching
at a black women's college, and becoming involved in the movement against racial
segregation. I became aware of how badly twisted was the teaching and writing
of history by its submersion of nonwhite people. Yes, Native Americans were
there in the history, but quickly gone. Black people were visible as slaves,
then supposedly free, but invisible. It was a white man's history.

From elementary school to graduate school, I was given no suggestion that the
landing of Christopher Columbus in the New World initiated a genocide in which
the indigenous population of Hispaniola was annihilated. Or that this was the
first stage of what was presented as a benign expansion of the new nation, but
which involved the violent expulsion of Native Americans, accompanied by unspeakable
atrocities, from every square mile of the continent, until there was nothing
to do but herd them into reservations.

Every American schoolchild learns about the Boston Massacre, which preceded
the Revolutionary War against England. Five colonists were killed by British
troops in 1770. But how many schoolchildren learned about the massacre of six
hundred men, women, and children of the Pequot tribe in New England in 1637?
Or the massacre, in the midst of the Civil War, of hundreds of Native American
families at Sand Creek, Colorado, by U.S. soldiers?

Nowhere in my history education did I learn about the massacres of black people
that took place again and again, amid the silence of a national government pledged
by the Constitution to protect equal rights for all. For instance, in 1917 there
occurred in East St. Louis one of the many "race riots" that took
place in what our white-oriented history books called the "Progressive
Era." White workers, angered by an influx of black workers, killed perhaps
two hundred people, provoking an angry article by the African-American writer
W. E. B. Du Bois, "The Massacre of East St. Louis," and causing the
performing artist Josephine Baker to say: "The very idea of America makes
me shake and tremble and gives me nightmares."

I wanted, in writing people's history, to awaken a great consciousness of class
conflict, racial injustice, sexual inequality, and national arrogance.

But I also wanted to bring into the light the hidden resistance of the people
against the power of the establishment: the refusal of Native Americans to simply
die and disappear; the rebellion of black people in the anti-slavery movement
and in the more recent movement against racial segregation; the strikes carried
out by working people to improve their lives.

When I began work, five years ago, on what would become a companion volume
to my People's History, Voices of a People's History of the United States, I
wanted the voices of struggle, mostly absent in our history books, to be given
the place they deserve. I wanted labor history, which has been the battleground,
decade after decade, century after century, of an ongoing fight for human dignity,
to come to the fore. And I wanted my readers to experience how at key moments
in our history some of the bravest and most effective political acts were the
sounds of the human voice itself. When John Brown proclaimed at his trial that
his insurrection was "not wrong, but right," when Fannie Lou Hamer
testified in 1964 about the dangers to blacks who tried to register to vote,
when during the first Gulf War, in 1991, Alex Molnar defied the president on
behalf of his son and of all of us, their words influenced and inspired so many
people. They were not just words but actions.

To omit or to minimize these voices of resistance is to create the idea that
power only rests with those who have the guns, who possess the wealth, who own
the newspapers and the television stations. I want to point out that people
who seem to have no power, whether working people, people of color, or women
-- once they organize and protest and create movements -- have a voice no government
can suppress.

America's Missing Voices

Readers of A People's History of the United States almost always point
to the wealth of quoted material in it -- the words of fugitive slaves, Native
Americans, farmers and factory workers, dissenters and dissidents of all kinds.
These readers are struck, I must reluctantly admit, more by the words of the
people I quote than by my own running commentary on the history of the nation.

I can't say I blame them. Any historian would have difficulty matching the
eloquence of the Native American leader Powhatan, pleading with the white settler
in the year 1607: "Why will you take by force what you may have quietly
by love?"

Or the black scientist Benjamin Banneker, writing to Thomas Jefferson: "I
apprehend you will readily embrace every opportunity, to eradicate that train
of absurd and false ideas and opinions which so generally prevails with respect
to us, and that your Sentiments are concurrent with mine, which are that one
universal Father hath given being to us all, and that he hath not only made
us all of one flesh, but that he hath also without partiality afforded us all
the Same Sensations and [endowed] us all with the same faculties."

Or Sarah Grimké, a white Southern woman and abolitionist, writing: "I
ask no favors for my sex. . . . All I ask of our brethren, is that they will
take their feet from off our necks, and permit us to stand upright on that ground
which God designed us to occupy."

Or Henry David Thoreau, protesting the Mexican War, writing on civil disobedience:
"A common and natural result of an undue respect for law is, that you may
see a file of soldiers, colonel, captain, corporal, privates, powder-monkeys,
and all, marching in admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against
their wills, ay, against their common sense and consciences, which makes it
very steep marching indeed, and produces a palpitation of the heart."

Or Jermain Wesley Loguen, escaped slave, speaking in Syracuse on the Fugitive
Slave Law of 1850: "I received my freedom from Heaven and with it came
the command to defend my title to it. . . . I don't respect this law -- I don't
fear it -- I won't obey it! It outlaws me, and I outlaw it."

Or the populist orator Mary Elizabeth Lease of Kansas: "Wall Street owns
the country. It is no longer a government of the people, by the people, and
for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall
Street."

Or Emma Goldman, speaking to the jury at her trial for opposing World War I:
"Verily poor as we are in democracy, how can we give of it to the world?
. . . [A] democracy conceived in the military servitude of the masses, in their
economic enslavement, and nurtured in their tears and blood, is not democracy
at all."

Or Mississippi sharecropper Fannie Lou Hamer, testifying in 1964 about the
dangers to blacks who tried to register to vote: "[T]he plantation owner
came, and said, 'Fannie Lou. . . . If you don't go down and withdraw your registration,
you will have to leave . . . because we are not ready for that in Mississippi.'
And I addressed him and told him and said, 'I didn't try to register for you.
I tried to register for myself.'"

Or the young black people in McComb, Mississippi, who, learning of a classmate
killed in Vietnam, distributed a leaflet: "No Mississippi Negroes should
be fighting in Vietnam for the White Man's freedom, until all the Negro People
are free in Mississippi."

Or the poet Adrienne Rich, writing in the 1970s: "I know of no woman --
virgin, mother, lesbian, married, celibate -- whether she earns her keep as
a housewife, a cocktail waitress, or a scanner of brain waves -- for whom the
body is not a fundamental problem: its clouded meanings, its fertility, its
desire, its so-called frigidity, its bloody speech, its silences, its changes
and mutilations, its rapes and ripenings."

Or Alex Molnar, whose twenty-one-year-old son was a Marine in the Persian Gulf,
writing an angry letter to the first President Bush: "Where were you, Mr.
President, when Iraq was killing its own people with poison gas? . . . I intend
to support my son and his fellow soldiers by doing everything I can to oppose
any offensive American military action in the Persian Gulf."

Or Orlando and Phyllis Rodriguez, opposing the idea of retaliation after their
son was killed in the Twin Towers: "Our son Greg is among the many missing
from the World Trade Center attack. Since we first heard the news, we have shared
moments of grief, comfort, hope, despair, fond memories with his wife, the two
families, our friends and neighbors, his loving colleagues at Cantor Fitzgerald/ESpeed,
and all the grieving families that daily meet at the Pierre Hotel. We see our
hurt and anger reflected among everybody we meet. We cannot pay attention to
the daily flow of news about this disaster. But we read enough of the news to
sense that our government is heading in the direction of violent revenge, with
the prospect of sons, daughters, parents, friends in distant lands dying, suffering,
and nursing further grievances against us. It is not the way to go. It will
not avenge our son's death. Not in our son's name."

What is common to all these voices is that they have mostly been shut out of
the orthodox histories, the major media, the standard textbooks, the controlled
culture. The result of having our history dominated by presidents and generals
and other "important" people is to create a passive citizenry, not
knowing its own powers, always waiting for some savior on high -- God or the
next president -- to bring peace and justice.

History, looked at under the surface, in the streets and on the farms, in GI
barracks and trailer camps, in factories and offices, tells a different story.
Whenever injustices have been remedied, wars halted, women and blacks and Native
Americans given their due, it has been because "unimportant" people
spoke up, organized, protested, and brought democracy alive.

This article is adapted from the introduction to Voices of a People's History of the United States (Seven Stories Press) and is reprinted by permission of the publisher. It was also published by www.tomdispatch.com, a weblog of the Nation Institute, which offers a steady flow of alternate sources, news and opinion from Tom Engelhardt, a long time editor in publishing, the author of The End of Victory Culture, and a fellow of the Nation Institute.

More Comments:

andy mahan -
9/19/2006

All true and let's not forget the very heavy influences of the various state constitutions that were represented at the formation of the US. Absent those influences what was done here in 1781 was a bold departure from what had been done in history up til then.

andy mahan -
9/19/2006

Well stated Mr. Rodriguez. Sounds like the same formula for developing propaganda. As such propaganda has a useful purpose too. Problem is that it is fundementally dishonest.

Sandor A. Lopescu -
4/16/2005

Brilliant summary!

Sandor A. Lopescu -
4/16/2005

I apologize for the triple posting--I assure you it was a server error of some sort and I didn't intend it. Also, I'm relieved that Zinn never won a Pulitzer Prize.

Sandor A. Lopescu -
4/16/2005

Brilliant summary!

Sandor A. Lopescu -
4/16/2005

I apologize for the triple posting--I assure you it was a server error of some sort and I didn't intend it. Also, I'm relieved that Zinn never won a Pulitzer Prize.

Sandor A. Lopescu -
4/16/2005

Brilliant summary!

Mathias broeckaert -
4/1/2005

I just finished the book and even, from a "neo-marxist" historical view the book is very subjective, because constantly placing facts out of context, constantly omitting others.
But, I'm looking since 20 years from the outside, from overseas (Belgium) to the American Empire and his acts and deeds home and abroad..
So I'm glad the book is still so popular in America, in spite of its defiencies..
Surely, the American Empire as any other world power will collapse, but I dream along (with Zinn) that the US will make a peaceful and undoubtly long transition to a more modest and socially based nation living in consent with the REAL majority of its own population and the rest of the world.

Gregory E Brougham -
2/21/2005

Howard Zinn's books was a needed corrective in its time. But its Marxist bent, which has some historograhical use, also creates or magnifies many ironies. How does such a class obsessed view explain the political vision and orientation of Whigs such as J.Q. Adams and Jacksonian Democrats such as Polk?. I see a lot of "The People" gathered at the dangling feet of a lynched African American. I have a feeling that dehuminisation took place before Christianity , Europe, and the United States.

Derek Charles Catsam -
2/3/2005

If I left that impression, I am sorry. However, I stand by the assertion -- since its introduction the US Constitution has been profoundly influential in shaping the constitutions of other democratic nations. I still do not know why others find this objectionable. Yes, I would say that it has had more influence than Britain's or France's. I wouold say that our written Bill of Rights has had a profound impact on constitutional law globally. Do you disagree, or are we at the point of quibbling over the use of articles "a" and "the" (and will we note that I still never said that it was the sole influence at any point. Simply a vitally important one.)

dc

Ralph E. Luker -
2/3/2005

Well, hardly, Mr. Lopescu, even if you repeat it three times as a mantra. Start with the fact that Zinn did not win a Pulitzer Prize for A People's History or for anything else.

K. Bonbright -
2/3/2005

You may not have used the exact phrase *the* model, but you certainly implied it when you wrote that the idea of the Bill of Rights came from the US Constitution. Rather than acknowledge some obvious facts, like the existence of the English Bill of Rights upon which our own was based or that South Africa was once part of the British Empire, you insist that the American model is the dominant influence.

If I misread your intent, I apologize- but I don't think I did.

Derek Charles Catsam -
2/2/2005

Chris --
Please tell me where I say "many of the articles could have been taken directly from the US Constitution". Saying that something I never said is ridiculous might make yiou feel like you have siome sense of superiority, but it does not change the fact that I did not say what you say that I said. Hopw about arguing with what i said, rather than with something against wghich it is easy to argue even if no one is arguing that thing?
The same could be said for the other comments -- at no point did I deny that the US Constitution had no other influences. At what point did I say that the US Constitution was *the* model for other Constitutions? Oh, yeah, never. So go ahead and quibble with something i did not actually say. In any case, the US Constitution surely was a major influence on the way democracies have played out over the rest of the globe.
Is this that hard or that controversial of an assertion? The US Constitution, as I aid, was A foundation for other Constitutions. I think that it is more of a foundation than, say, Hindu law treatises. I think the evidence is in my favor on this rather unobjectionable assertion.

dc

chris l pettit -
2/2/2005

I took an interesting course in grad school when getting my masters and law degrees in which we looked at the difference between constitutions and constitutional systems. While it would be somewhat accurate to say that the US constitution was the first Constitution to incorporate the values into a coherent document, constitutional systems had been incorporating such ideals for a long time. You can reference religious documents such as the Bible (New Testament) and Pali Canon...many of the law treatises from Hindu, Jewish and Islamic traditions...the Magna Carta and English constiutional documents...the Golden Bull and papal documents...etc. Andy's statement about the state constitutions is also very accurate, although it is unfortunate that he will probably have meant it in a Federalist manner that is inconsistent with anything constitutional. You can claim that there were discrepencies, omissions, and prejudices in all these examples, but the same was true of the US Constitution...free and equal? White land owning men maybe...so the document has many of the same flaws as its predecessors and is still being used to support ideological positions. So do we separate constitutions and constitutionalism (very foolish in my opinion) or do we acknowledge that the document, while great, is not original, is not anything other than ideological, and is manipulated for whatever uses one wants to enlist it for?

DC - in this vein your comment that many of the articles could have been taken directly from the US Constitution is again a red herring...seeing what you want to see...i could just as easily claim that most of the same provisions you cite were taken from the French Constitution, the British documents, international law, other religious documents, etc...it is all part of a flowing and coherent process. So saying that it comes directly from the US Consitution is ridiculous...

CP

Gonzalo Rodriguez -
2/2/2005

I was assigned "The People's History" in high school. Here's what I learned.

The method of neo-Marxist historians:

1) Start with the assumption that all history is driven by a dialectical and hierarchical relationship between socio-economic groups, and then assign (create, or impose) the role of dominant/subaltern groups (regardless of whether those groups existed in anyone's consciousness during that time period). Accordingly:

2) Ignore any and all examples of individual agency within history. Reduce all people to choiceless pawns being controlled by the deeper forces of History and Society (except, of course, the neo-Marxist historian, who, remarkably and uniquely, is free and aware).

3) Ignore what historical subjects actually believe about themselves and their actions, as if we, as historians, know the meaning of the lives of people better than they themselves did.

4) Ignore historical context, since, like Hegel said, all history is really just the self-realization of its fundamental essence, which never changes.

5) After this rigorous process, "discover" the truth: all history is driven by a dialectical and hierarchical relationship between socio-economic groups! Eureka!

6) Receive Pulitzer Prize, get rich, give lectures to the famous, and get to revel, paradoxically, in the material luxuries of a bourgeois life while circumventing its associated guilt by getting to think of yourself as a "dissident" who speaks for your cartoonish characterization of "the people."

What a racket! Can I sign up?

To be serious, though, I do see the value in this type of social history popularized since the 1960s, and I think the field is enriched by it -- but only if it supplements/moderates other types of histories. Taken by itself, especially in microhistories, the Marxist or neo-Marxist method of history is sorely inadequate. It is far too narrow-minded. If I help an old lady across the street, say the Marxists, I've done so not out of "altruism" (which cannot be quantified), but because it was somehow a form of asserting power over her, depending on the social groups assigned to us by the scholar who deconstructs that event(race, sex, ethnicity, class, or whatever leads to tenure). Marxist histories can broaden our understanding of history (especially as our focus broadens over a long period of time), but to write an entire textbook out of its method results in little more than a political rant -- more suited to a partisan magazine than a forum of true scholarship.

K. Bonbright -
2/2/2005

Not to quibble (okay, I'm quibbling), but the framers of the Constitution were not exactly inventing the wheel. Indeed, most of our Bill of Rights are based on the English Bill of Rights (1689) adopted after the Glorious Revolution. To go even farther back, many of the ideas contained in the Bill of Rights can also be found in the Magna Carta.

You do not have to be resolutely oppposed to the United States to deny that it is *the* model of other constitutions. Just as James Madison looked to British, Roman, and Greek precedents, it should not be surprising that the South African government would look at *many* constitutions in order to craft the best document for their nation.

I think our Constitution is a great document and sufficiently flexible to allow for adaptation, but I am not arrogant enough to think that it is the only possible way to have good government or that it is the only model for a good constitution. Talk about American hubris!

K. Bonbright -
2/2/2005

Not to quibble (okay, I'm quibbling), but the framers of the Constitution were not exactly inventing the wheel. Indeed, most of our Bill of Rights are based on the English Bill of Rights (1689) adopted after the Glorious Revolution. To go even farther back, many of the ideas contained in the Bill of Rights can also be found in the Magna Carta.

You do not have to be resolutely oppposed to the United States to deny that it is *the* model of other constitutions. Just as James Madison looked to British, Roman, and Greek precedents, it should not be surprising that the South African government would look at *many* constitutions in order to craft the best document for their nation.

I think our Constitution is a great document and sufficiently flexible to allow for adaptation, but I am not arrogant enough to think that it is the only possible way to have good government or that it is the only model for a good constitution. Talk about American hubris!

Derek Charles Catsam -
2/1/2005

back from class --
Chris -- the South African Constitution has a Bill of Rights. Wherever would they get that idea? because ours provides, as i said, a "foundation" for it. The idea of a bill of rights seems obvious now. It did not in 1789. The Bill of Rights is central to the South African Constitution. Albie Sachs is vitally important. I have no qualms even if he says that the South Africans did not use the American Constitution specifically, though I'd want to be there to hear how the question was asked and what his precise answer was if that is what he does say. But the fact remains that the rudiments of our Constitution have so pervaded the establishment of democracies that no written Constitution in democratic (heck, even nondemocratic) societies does not carry the influence of our remarkable document. Are you rewally so resolutely opposed to the United States that you are not willing to acknowledge the influence of our Constitution even when those of us whop do acknowledge that we have not always lived up to its values?

dc

Derek Charles Catsam -
2/1/2005

Chris 0--
i too have worked in South Africa on these issues. And what i said, despite what you have written, is absolutely true. The South Africans used the US Constitution. They also used the documents and idea that you mentioned. But read some of the language. It is clearly derived from the US Constitution, and beyond that, most of the things you mention also were influenced by the ideals of the Constitution. reverting to an argument by authority does not change the fact that on the facts i am not wrong, and you admit as much. The US Constitution was a foundational document. I never asserted that it was the only foundational document for the SA Constitution.
dc

chris l pettit -
2/1/2005

Where did you get that last tidbit from?

I can definitively say...and will be happy to get Judge Sachs confirmation on this, as he is one of the major architects of the South African Constitution...that the US Constitution was one of many that was looked at in framing the South African constitution...but that international law, human rights, economic social and cultural rights, as well as constitutional systems that dont necessarily have discernable constitutions (UK) played a large role as well. The US Constitution was admired for its values, but it was recognised the the US government has totally betrayed those values and rendered the document almost ineffective, something that the South Africans mean to build upon and learn from. So many constitutions were used...including Islamic ones that I am sure you would claim were oppressive. So your little bout of back patting is mostly in vain...

CP

Derek Charles Catsam -
2/1/2005

It seems clear that Zinn's presentism gets the best of him at most all turns. The Constitution was written in an age when it made the United States government quite literally the most inclusive and "democratic" (actually republican-democratic, but no matter) in human history. It is not surprising that aspects of it might seem retrograde now. But it still endures remarkably well so that "the people" can change and adapt that document without calls for revolution. The Constitution is a remarkable document. However we have not lived up to its ideals, those ideals still exist and we still can work toward them. That is a remarkable thing. It is also a remarkable thing that nations who make the transition from tyranny to democracy almost always use ours as a foundation for writing their constiotutions. See, for example, South Africa.

dc

John H. Lederer -
1/31/2005

"The Preamble to the United States Constitution, which declares that "we the people" wrote this document, is a great deception. The Constitution was written in 1787 by fifty-five rich white men -- slave owners, bondholders, merchants -- who established a strong central government that would serve their class interests."

My copy of the Constitution refers to the People ordaining and establishing the Constitution, not writing it. I always assumed that referred to the ratifiaction of it by the state conventions most of whom asserted to represent the "People" something along the lines of:

"Be it Known unto all Men that We the Delegates of the People of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in general Convention assembled Have assented to, and ratified, and by these presents Do in the Name and by the authority of the Same People, and for ourselves, assent to, and ratify the foregoing Constitution for the United States of America." http://www.barefootsworld.net/constit9.html

I am sure the state conventions were not excellent representations of the "people". But they were different in function , in number, in selection/election and in authority than the 55 authors, and were, I think, more representative of the "people".